Plants Always Win

Spring is tiptoeing in and we want to set you up for the smoothest garden year ever. This week we’re recording live on location in Erin’s garden and examining what tasks she has already done, what’s next on the list, and what pressures to let go of. (Remember: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!)

The first order of business as winter ends is to ...

Are you breaking the law every time you plant a shrub?

This week we welcome Ian Simpson, VP of Communications and Corporate Affairs at Ontario One Call. That’s the public safety administrative authority that makes sure your gardening project doesn’t end in a damaged gas line or ruptured water main. You’ll find Call Before You Dig services across Canada an...

For some of us, happiness is a hydrangea in full, glorious bloom.

And if you’re not yet well acquainted with these flowering shrubs, who better to learn from than The Garden Lady herself? C.L. Fornari is the author of the upcoming 2026 book Hydrangea Happiness: Planting, Pruning and Blooming, among many others. She’s also a well-known gardening radio host and p...

The internet is a minefield of questionable plant hacks, rage bait, and—sigh—banana water. Good thing The Plant Prof is here to shed some science on the matter.

Vikram Baliga, a.k.a. The Plant Prof, is a professor of horticulture and the host of the podcasts Planthropology and Deep Roots. He is that rare being in the world of science: an academic who has also h...

In this versus episode, we bring you two of the nicest-smelling and slowest-growing plants in the garden. Sean gets us started with rosemary, which is known to science as Salvia rosemarinus (though some botanists may be surprised to hear that!). We learn how to grow this Mediterranean plant and how to help it handle a northern winter, even if that means bringing it indoors. One option, of course, is to...

As the 2026 growing season waves tantalizingly on the far horizon, we’d like to help you prepare for a disaster-free garden. To do that, we’re sharing a few key landscape design principles…along with a whole heap of stories about landscape design fails.

No garden is truly no-maintenance, but while ordinary weeding and pruning is one thing, fighting endle...

If you’re looking to build a relationship with the land that feeds you, you can start by embracing the wisdom of the Internet’s Mushroom Auntie.

Gabrielle Cerberville, a.k.a. your new Mushroom Auntie, a.k.a. The Chaotic Forager, has spent her academic life collecting degrees in music. If you catch her in the forest, however, she’s more likely to be collec...

Feeding humanity doesn’t need to come at the Earth’s expense. Elspeth Hay is here to talk nut trees, ecosystems, and humans as keystone species. 

In 2019, Elspeth was a local food writer who felt despondent about humans’ need to tear up nature in order to feed ourselves. When she discovered that acorns are edible—that they had, in fact, once be...

Kids ask the best nature questions!

For this episode, a class of elementary-school students prepared a list of questions about plants for Sean and Erin to answer. The best part, of course, is that these are questions few adults would think to ask, and they let our hosts explore all sorts of fascinating topics. How did plants come to be the way they are? Why did they e...

This episode is what happens when two people’s loves for venus flytraps, spooky season, and movie musicals collide. 

Yes, we’re doing nerdy Halloween horticulture by analyzing the representation of carnivorous plants in the classic musical Read more